January 10: How Presidents Ought to Behave
Watching Jimmy Carter’s state funeral on January 9 was a sad and sometimes inspiring experience. But given what’s about to happen on January 20, it also served as a reminder about presidential conduct, as I explained at New York:
The state funeral of the 39th president, Jimmy Carter, at the National Cathedral in Washington had all the trappings of the traditional suspension of political warfare in the face of death. Every living ex-president (and most of their vice-presidents) was there, which led to hallucinatory moments like Barack Obama amiably chitchatting with Donald Trump as they sat next to each other in the pews. Among the many eulogies to the Georgian, one that definitely stood out was one written before his own death by the 38th president, Gerald Ford, Carter’s Republican opponent in 1976, who wrote movingly of the partnership and friendship the two men formed during their long post–White House years. It was both sad and touching that the current chief executive, Joe Biden, reached back nearly a half-century to his own endorsement of Carter’s presidential candidacy in the year he defeated Ford.
But it was impossible to forget for a moment that the solemn event that brought this disparate audience together was occurring just 11 days before the re-inauguration of Donal Trump. The incoming president differs in so many respects from Jimmy Carter, and his return to power is a living repudiation of so much of what Carter believed in.
In his own view, Carter’s inveterate truthfulness was his most important personal virtue; “I’ll never lie to you,” he often said when running for president in a country anguished by Tricky Dick Nixon’s administration. Whether or not Carter was able to live up to this lofty commitment to honesty, it contrasts dramatically with Trump’s extremely flexible attitude toward facts and refusal to take personal responsibility for the consequences of his sins (on one infamous occasion, he could not come up with a single thing he had ever done that required divine forgiveness).
Carter’s great legacy in international affairs was his effort to anchor U.S. foreign policy in universal human rights. Trump rejects any standard for foreign policy other than the most naked national self-interest and has gone out of his way to dismiss global standards banning the torture of prisoners of war and military strikes on civilian populations.
Carter had a wonk’s passion for tinkering with government operations to make them more efficient and responsive. Trump is indifferent to the minutiae of governing, and his big reform initiative is to give tech bros Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy license to blow up whole agencies and radically reduce spending as ends in themselves.
In the long arc of political history, Carter is renowned for leading his own southern region out of the darkness of Jim Crow and building a mind-blowing coalition of civil-rights activists and ex-segregationists. Even if you believe Trump is without personal prejudice, he has very clearly made politics safe for a resurgence of racism and has made the pursuit of racial justice and equality a target of legal action and mockery.
As every eulogist at Carter’s funeral emphasized, he was a man of deep and abiding Christian faith, teaching Sunday school back in Plains for many decades. He wasn’t transactional in his religiosity; he took positions on social and cultural issues that led his fellow evangelical Protestants to abandon him and his party, and he led his own congregation out of its traditional denomination when that larger church refused to treat women equally. If Trump has any personal religious convictions, they are largely a secret, and he has formed a highly transactional relationship with conservative Christians, who are forever rationalizing his manifest impiety. Until his wife’s death, Jimmy Carter closed every day reading the Bible in Spanish with Rosalynn. Trump’s relationship with Holy Scripture (other than misquoting it) is mostly limited to hustling expensive Bibles to his devoted followers.
The American presidency is a collection of men with all sorts of varying personalities and backgrounds, and it’s entirely possible someone wildly different from Jimmy Carter is what this country needs. But it’s hard to undertake comparisons of the ex-president who just died and the ex-president who is about to re-enter the White House and see anything other than a devolution in integrity, fidelity to civic and religious traditions, and willingness to work with others peacefully. As Biden succinctly said in his eulogy, Carter’s “enduring attribute” was “character. Character. Character.” What sort of character is Donald Trump?
As a religious believer, Jimmy Carter undoubtedly had faith in the power of a beneficent God to regenerate souls and administer justice, so he’d be the first to pray for the success of Trump’s second administration. But the signs aren’t great. Indeed, the soon-to-be 47th president spoiled any grace note he might have struck by attending his predecessor’s funeral when he
openly whined that the half-staff flags honoring Carter would ruin the vibe at his own inauguration. Perhaps he will acquire the decency to think less of himself and more of the people whose lives he is about to change in ways that terrify many of them. Jimmy Carter’s first book was titled
Why Not the Best?, and it treated self-improvement as personal and national goal. The self-styled champion of American greatness could take a page from that book and emulate Carter’s understated (and imperfect) greatness in asking himself and his country to live up to its most enduring values.
> And yet, according to the latest GWU
> Battleground Poll on Leadership Qualities, more
> people rank Bush much higher than Kerry in five
> out of six catagories…
Nonetheless, I think the Kerry people could exploit two important things to their advantage. Number one, distinguish between “showing leadership” (=walking around with a megaphone at WTC ground zero, talking to troops and firemen) as the Bush campaign calls it, and actually LEADING people. Kerry has done the latter in Vietnam, of course. “Shrub” actually has very little leadership experience, when it comes to real-world leadership.
Two: make WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan’s worst fears come true by presenting Kerry’s cautious, less reckless style as something POSITIVE! After all, if you have friends or relatives currently serving in Iraq, wouldn’t you rather prefer a President who actually relies on facts rather than blind faith before setting aside $200 billion and 0.15 million soldiers for a war?
MARCU$
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110005288
As ABC’s The Note said recently, look for some major GOP surprises in July, August or September. The Chimpy and his Chimp People are in serious trouble, they know it, and they are not going to go with a fight — e.g., major dirty tricks fireworks.
“New surveys by The New York Times and the Washington Post reveal a perilous plunge in the commander-in-chief’s credibility. The Times found that 79 percent of the public thinks Bush either is hiding something about Iraq, or worse, is “mostly lying” about it. The Post asked whether Bush or Kerry is “honest and trustworthy,” and the president was judged to be honest by 39 percent. Kerry came in at 52 percent.”
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-vpcoc013874764jul01,0,7049200.column?coll=ny-news-columnists
And yet, according to the latest GWU Battleground Poll on Leadership Qualities, more people rank Bush much higher than Kerry in five out of six catagories…even the Honest and Trustworthy one!
See http://www.pollingreport.com I just don’t understand their rational in having those opinions!
I believe that another terrorist attack on American soil would end up HURTING President Bush, precisely because of the trend in views that these recent polls reflect. If voters associate Iraq with increased chances of a terrorist threat, and those threats are realized, I think they will punish Bush at the polls– notwithstanding conservative carping about how electing Kerry sends a message of weakness.
Ruy- ‘independent’ voters seem to have opinions favorable to Kerry but how is the ‘independence’ of these voters determined. Is it past voting preference or current self-identification? If it is self-identification aren’t these numbers skewed? If you are disenchanted with republican policies aren’t you going to stop identifying yourself as one? So, indeed, ‘independents’ might be more critical of the administration but it isn’t a static population, but a growing group as Democrats begin to dominate the party preference i.d. I’m not sure of the significance of that but it seems like there might be different electoral strategies involved.
Um. Tim. That story was from April, 2003. They stopped blogging over a year ago.
Sorry forgot to send link: http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/iraq/tombrown/archives/2003_04.html
Ruy, Check this out. This is a liberal blogger. What do you think, is the media going to stop reporting war news just in time for the most crucial point in the campaign?
Tim